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Culture of Care w/Adaku Utah

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Rad Ops - The Podcast
Rad Ops - The Podcast
Culture of Care w/Adaku Utah
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🎧The Rad Ops Podcast is one component of a dialogue-based tool that supports organizations assessing and discussing the possibilities and limitations of putting liberatory values into practice. Each guest will share their Rad Ops lineages, their expertise on today’s pressing operations questions and leave listeners with resources and discussion questions to take back to your teams.

In this episode we talk about Culture of Care with our guest, Adaku Utah, Director of Movement Building Programs at the Building Movement Project. 

Resources from this episode:

Discussion questions to take to your team:

  • How is your organization defining and directing care?
  • Where do you see a gap between what your organization values and cares about publicly and how things actually function internally in your organization, and what would it take to close that gap in practice? 
  • What boundaries would make care more durable for you and others ?
  • What contradictions around care are most alive in your work right now? What does it reveal about where your organization needs to grow? 
  • What season is your organization in? (Summer, Spring, Autumn or Winter) 

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Produced by Josh Elstro with Convergence magazine. Design support from Kimmie David. Music by Tigercat, Sha’s amazing 10-year-old, with polish by Josh.

Episode Guests

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Adaku Utah

Born in Baltimore and raised in Festac, Nigeria, Adaku comes from a lineage of organizers, farmers, and healers, a legacy that shapes everything they do. They believe liberation requires transforming the conditions we face while tending to our beloved communities, creating movements where we can be whole, and practicing interdependence, tenderness, and accountability as we build the world we long for.

Adaku’s work over two decades across gender, reproductive, race, and healing justice movements continues to deepen their practice as a grassroots strategist, abolitionist healer, movement facilitator, somatics practitioner, and ritual artist. They support organizations and movements in building the culture, solidarity, and healing infrastructure needed for crisis, transformation, and the sustainable path toward liberation.

Currently, they serve as Director of Movement Building Programs at the Building Movement Project, supporting both rapid-response work and long-term solidarity initiatives. They co-host the Solidarity Is This podcast with Deepa Iyer, developing frameworks and practices that deepen transformative solidarity and collective care across movements. Adaku was previously Organizing Director at the National Network of Abortion Funds and co-facilitates Harriet’s Apothecary, an all-Black healer collective rooted in abolition and healing justice.

As a senior teacher with BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity) and other national embodied leadership programs, Adaku nurtures the kind of transformative leadership and organizations our movements need, grounded in humility, aligned with our deepest values, connected to each other, and built for the long haul toward liberation.

About the Host

Sha Grogan-Brown

Sha Grogan-Brown is an anti-racist white queer transman and rad dad. Sha has worked to strengthen movements for social justice since the late ’90s, and is dedicated to increasing the effectiveness and self-sustaining capacity of grassroots organizations. For many years he identified as a plumber and then an architect for the movement, ensuring systems and structures for successful organizing.

Sha recently joined the founding team of The Patients Union as the Chief of Member Engagement and Services. Sha worked with Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) from 2001–2008, was the Grassroots Fundraising Coordinator for the U.S. Social Forum 2010, and worked at Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ) from 2010-2025. Sha currently is Project Co-Director of Rad Ops, and serves on the boards of GGJ Action Fund, Justice Funders and CISPES. In the past he has served on the boards of Grassroots International, Resource Generation and Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT), and was the Art Editor for the second edition of Trans Bodies Trans Selves: A Resource Guide for the Transgender Community (aff).

In his free time Sha bikes around the city, paints, draws, writes, reads gay romance or YA sci-fi novels, and spends time eating yummy foods with his partner and 10 year old kid.

Yashna Maya Padamsee

Yashna Maya Padamsee is a first generation south asian immigrant queer femme raised in and by the US South. Yashna has spent 20+ years supporting social movements through creating innovative infrastructure and sharing liberatory healing practices. She uses systems thinking, organizing, art making, somatics, faith and yoga for healing and transformation at the intersections of immigration, labor, gender + sexuality and bodily autonomy.

During Yashna’s 7+ years on staff with The National Domestic Workers Alliance, she created containers of care through foundational systems that continue to be built upon at and beyond the organization today. She has also been an Adult Literacy program coordinator in Durham, NC, a faith-based immigrant rights organizer at the Bay Area IAF, moderated a Community Care discussion on OrganizingUpgrade (now Convergence Magazine), the lead of a Disability Justice committee at generative somatics and the Gatherer of the Lineages of Change Tarot.

Alongside Felicia Martinez, Tara Shaui Ellison, and Mae Singerman, Yashna is a co-founder and moderator of RadOps, a justice based online network for operations workers in movement organizations. She is Co-Director of Sanctuary Embodied, which brings transformative practice and embodied skill building for Left movement leaders and formations to build collective power and develop compelling cultures that can sustain for the long haul.

Yashna enjoys watching good (and not so good) TV shows, eating dumplings or dal with her partner Ang, and taking their sweet dog Monkey on a walk at sunset at the Eno River.